The Adventurous Cheap$kate Goes Splurging

Being adventurous sometimes means compromising being a cheapskate. At this point in the semester, I have excused myself from spending $5 per day countless times. Sometimes it’s justified, but sometimes I mess up in expensive ways. Here are some instances when I spent more than $5 in one day, intentionally or not:

UNINTENTIONAL

Buying grapes: On one of my first days in Saigon, a street vendor selling fruit demanded 100,000 dong ($5) for a tiny bag of black grapes. Assuming I was getting ripped off because I’m a foreigner, I tried to negotiate. The woman in turn started to harass me in Vietnamese and began to attract a crowd, so I sheepishly handed over my entire allotment for the day.

Drinking too much. Alcohol kills…budgets.

Not knowing what food I’m ordering. I like to think I’m fearless when it comes to food at this point, but every now and then I order something that is truly disgusting. As a result, I break my budget buying a second meal to compensate for the inedible one.

INTENTIONAL

Treating my Vietnamese partner. Loyola students are paired with Vietnamese university students to learn about each other’s cultures. My partner has been the ultimate tour guide during my semester abroad; she takes me on motorbike rides, scouts out bars to try and does her best to hold in laughter when I practice Vietnamese phrases. Treating her to coffee, dinner and souvenirs is the least I can do in exchange for her providing me a window into Vietnam.

Buying pizza. All Western food is much more expensive than the local cuisine in Vietnam, so I choose not to eat much of it. But occasionally, an American needs pizza. Despite having shaped my day around the fact that I would be purchasing a $4 personal pizza for dinner, I still ended up about 50 cents over budget.

Traveling outside of Saigon. Paying for transportation, housing and tours can get costly, even though it’s more affordable in Southeast Asia than in Western countries, but I do pretty well at limiting food purchases and souvenirs to less than $5 a day while I’m traveling.

Hiring motorbike taxis instead of walking or taking the public bus. On occasions when I am lost, running late or too sweaty to go on, I splurge, and the feeling of flying is well worth it. Rides typically cost about $2.

It may seem silly to stress about going over budget by $1 or $2 because that’s pocket change in the United States. Most of my classmates and I have gotten accustomed to the currency gap, though; we think in terms of dong, not dollars. Getting a full meal for $3 sounds like a bargain, but in Vietnam that equates to 60,000 dong, which some Vietnamese consider quite pricey.